MOREHEAD CITY | Leaders leaned on Gov. Pat McCrory in Morehead City this week for help in fighting proposed homeowners insurance rate hikes averaging more than 25 percent.

While McCrory said he’d “be glad to lobby” for them, he advised them direct their lobby efforts to the state’s Insurance Commissioner Wayne Goodwin.

A hearing is set for 9 a.m. Oct. 20 in the Dobbs Building, 430 N. Salisbury St., Raleigh, to determine if the N.C. Rate Bureau can prove adequate justification for rate hikes, Goodwin announced Tuesday, noting at which there will be no public comments.

Rates requested by the N.C. Rate Bureau representing the insurance industry vary from a decrease of 2.7 percent to an increase of as much as 35 percent in some coastal counties.

Several local government leaders said people in coastal counties are being “priced out of paradise” with rate hikes that longtime residents can’t pay. With the proposed rates, those people will also not be able to sell the houses they can’t afford to live in.

Although Goodwin has supported lower rates, and a group from coastal counties called NC20 has long lobbied against the validity of information used to justify the rate hikes, those hikes may still come. Or, remaining insuring companies may follow suit with those who’ve already exited coverage in Eastern North Carolina.

Those attending asked if McCrory thinks it is time for the state to reconsider how and who handles insurance matters in North Carolina — the insurance commissioner is elected. Goodwin is a Democrat. McCrory is a Republican.

“I am concerned about people on the coast and I am hoping in the second and third year of my term to look at the whole structure of state government, at elected vs. appointed,” said McCrory. “It definitely needs a thorough review.”

Goodwin said if the governor advocates for an appointed, rather than elected, insurance commissioner, he is “taking away the power of the people.”

“Studies have shown states who have elected insurance commissioners have the lowest rates and the strongest protection,” Goodwin said.

Here are some of the other topics McCrory addressed during his visit:

With respect to an assortment of other issues like sea turtle habitat that affect coastal property and where decisions are made at the federal level, McCrory said, “We have to be strategic in picking our battles.”

While McCrory took credit for helping to get a 2 percent cut in individual and even larger cut in corporate state income tax, he agreed that “other taxes have gone up to make up the difference. It was tax reform with a move to more of a consumption-based tax. You pay tax on a newspaper now, lawyers have to pay tax, there are a host of other new or increased consumption taxes and we closed up a lot of loopholes.”

Page 2 of 2 - McCrory said he sees North Carolina’s Voter ID law as “common sense. It is ridiculous for the Justice Department to be challenging a voting requirement that requires the same ID to register as to get Sudafed. And we are giving free ID and three years to get it. It seems pretty reasonable to me.”

He said concerns about early voting are equally absurd since they allow as many hours of early voting as before, with more hours after the typical workday, just not on as many days.

Medicaid concerns, he said, have more merit when focused on the computer system to manage it and “we were afraid to turn it on and the amount of money required to fix it seems to be rising weekly.” But he said most of the kinks have been worked out by the recent one-year anniversary.

He said he stands by his position not to extend federal unemployment and to tighten the state’s belt so it could repay the $2.6 billion owed the feds for unemployment already paid out, and lowering state unemployment — which was 9th highest in the country — to compare more closely to neighboring states.

McCrory partially credited that with the decrease in unemployment from the 5th highest in the country at 9.4 percent when he took office to its current 6.4 percent, because “people are taking the jobs that are open.”